She regrets it now, of course: “I wish I had not taken the assignment, but when you’re under contract to a magazine – you accept the assignment and then you do them,” she says. Her attitude feels almost naive, coming from an era before social media opened up the industry to the world around it, and forced its insiders to better consider their decisions: “I thought I would see some really interesting ruins [Palmyra] that I would never have access to otherwise in my life,” she says, and is keen to point out that the cringe-making headline – “A rose in the desert” – was placed on her article after she submitted it
